In today's business environment information is of critical importance. But all information is not created equal and certain types of information are more important and more valuable than other types of information. One type of information which is highly valuable and highly prized is relationship information. A relationship is a piece of information that indicates an association or link between an individual or entity and another individual or entity. In the business environment, the most valuable type of relationship is a relationship that facilitates or supports the initiation and successful conclusion of a business dealing. Given that a transaction between two parties cannot begin until the parties are somehow brought together, relationships are vital pieces of information which can catalyze a business deal between two or more entities. For this reason, the relationship information held by an individual, an enterprise or a community is highly valuable.
The information about a particular individual or entity is contact information. The links between contacts are relationships. Commercial software providers have developed a number of different software tools that allow individuals and entities to manage their contacts, store their contacts, and share their contacts. Examples of such tools include Interaction, Outlook, and ACT. Some of these tools also have simple functionality to represent rudimentary relationship information, although they are typically time consuming to administer, difficult to set up and laborious to employ. Each typically requires that a new database be developed, maintained and serviced. For example, in Outlook relationships can be represented by notes in the body of contact cards stored in a public folder. Only then is the system available for users to search through to find relationships of interest.
Moreover, these systems fail to distinguish between a valuable relationship and a less valuable contact, unless a user has manually entered a suitable note to that effect. In other words, each relationship is treated the same; with no measure of relative strength. Consequently, when a user employs these tools it is difficult for the user to distinguish between relationships that are likely to be helpful, and relationships that are unlikely to be helpful.
An additional drawback with these existing systems is that they fail to provide desirable privacy protection for all participants in the system. Both the privacy provided and the flexibility in choosing privacy levels are inadequate. For example, the existing systems may sweep through the electronic address books of different individuals in an enterprise and take the collected information to form a database that is completely open: once the information is stored in the database any user can come and search that database to find a contact of interest and see the detailed contact information without informing the original ‘owner’ of that contact. As such, individuals are hesitant to put information into an electronic address book or other system that can get swept into a publicly available or enterprise wide contact system that will allow anyone to directly contact people they have personal relationships with. As individuals then use their electronic address book systems only for a portion of their contacts, the collected relationship information is incomplete.
The drawbacks of existing contact systems are troubling to any organization that would benefit greatly if it is able to better leverage the relationships that exist within its community. Contact manager systems do not adequately capture and rank relationships, they require manual entry and updating, and they do not provide adequate privacy protection for all participants. Current contact manager systems require substantial manual intervention, do not readily provide meaningful results, are difficult to search in a meaningful way and produce a subjective result. Using current technology, it is difficult to determine which contacts are identified with which entities, and which relationships are both valid and meaningful. These drawbacks, and others, make them poor tools for discovering contacts and relationships of participants in the network system.